To the Editor: There has been concern about the loss of health care professionals from South Africa, and while there are multiple factors contributing to this, one of them, in my opinion, is that health care professionals work under poor employment terms and conditions. My brief experience with South African employment after a period of time in the UK led to an unfair dismissal (Commission for ...

Labour market regulation in Australia and New Zealand has proceeded along a similar trajectory, sometimes intersecting and other times appearing to take divergent paths. Interest in comparing both systems of labour market regulation peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s when there was a marked divergence. The structural divergence was highlighted by the abolition of compulsory arbitration and the...

This paper examines networks as structures of relationships between heterogeneous actors. The heterogeneity of actors refers to business organisations, individuals within them, institutions, technologies and other artefacts, that participate in the development of business projects, or in supplier networks. A business project is considered to be any business activity related to production, distr...

We examine the impact of economic deregulation on employer evasion of union-mandated ‘formal’ wage-contracts in an import-competing industry. We show that, if the state maintains industrial employment despite import liberalisation, through cheaper credit to firms, then employer evasion will increase, due to a rise in the formal-informal wage gap. Institutional delays in punishment of employer e...

We study a labour market in which ...rms can observe workers’ output but not their e¤ort, and in which a worker’s productivity in a given ...rm depends on a worker-...rm speci...c component, unobservable for the ...rm. Firms o¤er wage contracts that optimally trade o¤ effort and wage costs. As a result, employed workers enjoy rents, which in turn create unemployment. We show that the incentive ...

In this paper we leverage a labour market reform (Fornero Law) which reduced firing restrictions for open-ended contracts in the case of firms with more than 15 employees Italy. The results from Difference Regression Discontinuities design demonstrate that after reform, number trained workers increased just above threshold by approximately 1.5 additional workers. We show effect can be explained...

This paper develops a model in which a firm writes labour contracts with workers and debt contracts with creditors. Firms have more information than do the owners of the factors of production and they are also subject to limited liability. We show that if the limited liability constraint is binding then the employment level is inefficient relative to a situation of symmetric information. The fi...

This paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 EU countries, using micro data from the ECHPS. Women are over-represented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflects women’s preferences and their need to combine work with child care, in southern Europe part-time jobs are often involuntary and provi...

The growth cycle and labour contract length This paper extends the growth cycle model à la Goodwin (1967) by introducing the risk-averse behaviour of the agents and a consequent positive correlation between wages and profitability. This extension is motivated by the impressive evidence on the joint role played by aggregate unemployment and lagged profitability in explaining wage determination. ...

This paper develops a model of intellectual labor augmentation to explain both the marriage wage premium and educational assortative mating. We suggest that husbands and wives are complementary factors of production where a spouse’s education and skills augment their partner’s productivity and earnings potential. We test this proposition using data from the 2000 U.S. Census of Population and th...